FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  520 (04/07/06)

Q. Whilst travelling in the United States, I became aware of the number of Bluetooth enabled cars. How does it work, and is there a list of Bluetooth cars in the UK? Are there any safety concerns with driving Bluetooth enabled cars?

Joshi Shah, via email

A. A Bluetooth ‘enabled’ car simply has a built-in wireless hands-free car kit that works with Bluetooth equipped mobile phones. On some top-end models it is integrated with the vehicle’s entertainment and navigation systems, so you can control the stereo or sat-nav using voice commands.

It’s all clever stuff and virtually all of the world’s major car manufacturers have either started offering a Bluetooth ‘node’ as an option, or have announced that they plan to do so. However, as far as I am aware there is no master plan or list of manufacturers and models, at least not for the UK market where this idea is still very much in its infancy. You can easily find out what a particular car maker’s plans and current offerings are by Googling ‘ford uk bluetooth’, ‘bmw uk bluetooth’ and so on. There is also US ‘blog’ devoted to Bluetooth in cars. 

It is obviously designed to make motoring safer, by keeping the driver’s hands on the wheel, though whether or not their minds remain on the road whilst chatting is another question. There are at present no significant safety concerns over the emissions produced by Bluetooth equipment in cars. The radio frequency energy produced by these very short-range devices is very low and a fraction of that generated by mobile phones and other wireless products.

Q. How secure is a Bluetooth headset. Can I listen to music on my phone whilst flying?

Joanna Taylor, via email

A. There is a long list of Bluetooth ‘exploits’ including Bluebug, Snarf, Blue Blackdoor and Bluejacking, which allow anyone close enough, with the right equipment and know-how to extract data or monitor traffic between Bluetooth enabled devices. The only thing in Bluetooth’s favour is the very short range. The chances of your phone, PDA or laptop being randomly hacked in the street are quite small but the risk is much higher in the close confines of an aircraft or railway carriage.

As for using Bluetooth and mobile phones in aircraft the current situation is that no device that emits measurable amounts of radio frequency energy can be used during the ‘critical phases’ of a flight (i.e. takeoff and landing), in case it interferes with aircraft systems. Mobile phones are normally banned outright at all times. In practice the chances of anything untoward happening just because someone left their phone, laptop or personal stereo switched on are vanishingly small as all aircraft electronics are designed to operate in an electronically ‘noisy’ environment but the authorities take the view that it is better to be safe than sorry.

As a matter of interest one of the other reasons you are not allowed to use a mobile phone in flight is because of the havoc it would create on the ground. An airborne cellphone would be able to log on to scores and possibly hundreds of mobile phone sites and, in theory, it wouldn’t take too many aircraft passengers using their phones to jam an entire city’s network. Several airlines are experimenting with in-flight mobile phone systems. A mini satellite-linked cell-site inside the plane’s hull provides the connection and stops mobile phones ramping up their power outputs, trying to log onto ground-based cell sites, and no doubt will provide airlines with a useful extra source of income.

Q. The keyboard on my new PC is behaving oddly. The @ and quotes keys are reversed and I can’t find a pound sign anywhere.

Tim Storey, via email

A. By the sound of it Windows has been left on its default US Language setting so go into Control Panel and open Regional and Language Options, select the Languages tab click the Details button and change the keyboard setting to English (United Kingdom). You might want to check the other regional settings while you are at it. I’m guessing that you keyboard is a US or European model. If so it will have to be replaced with a UK one, with a pound sign, otherwise the labelling on several of the keycaps will be wrong.

Q. Like a previous respondents who have had problems with accidental use of the Caps Lock key I am also an erratic typist. I frequently hit numerals by mistake, which foxes the spellchecker. Is there any way I can turn off all keys except letters and the carriage return?

Chris Myers, via email

A. It’s not possible through Windows but an excellent little freeware keyboard manager and remapper program called KeyTweak lets you enable, disable or reassign the character or function on virtually every key on a standard keyboard. It’s safe to use and you can switch back to the default at any time.

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© R. Maybury 2006, 2006